system setup question

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dk199160

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Aug 22, 2013
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i have my os installed on my ssd, and i have all my games on my 1b velociraptor hard drive, if my velociraptor starts to fail how can i replace it since i have all my games on it and the OS installed on a separate drive?
 
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rvilkman
Well if you make an image of the velociraptor hard drive that you install on the 2nd hard drive. If / when it fails you 'should' be able to just replace the velociraptor with the new drive and it would continue to function as before.
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bigpinkdragon286

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Oct 3, 2012
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Copy the contents of the drive to it's replacement. Provided none of the files are in use, since it's not your boot drive, you should be fine to just make copies of everything on it. Once you've done that, power down, install the new disk you've copied the data to in place of the failing drive, boot, and verify the drive letter is correct. If the drive letter of the replacement drive is not the same as the drive it is replacing, start the Computer Management console and click on the Disk Management section. In disk management you'll be able to change the letter for non-booting drives to match what they should be.

Of course, there are more complicated methods if you like, but the above steps should be easy enough for you to figure out if you set your mind to it.
 
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AxlFone

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May 21, 2013
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rvilkman

rvilkman

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Well if you make an image of the velociraptor hard drive that you install on the 2nd hard drive. If / when it fails you 'should' be able to just replace the velociraptor with the new drive and it would continue to function as before.
 
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bigpinkdragon286

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Well, you don't even need to go so far as to image your secondary drive, since it's not the drive you're running Windows from. You don't need to uninstall anything, just make a complete copy of the disk to another disk, and voila. When, or perhaps if, the Velociraptor goes south, before you retire the computer, just replace it with the disk that has the copy of it's contents, making sure the drive letters are the same, so installed software is found in the correct location. :)

If you want software to use that is akin to the often recommended Norton Ghost, my personal favorite is SelfImage. It's freeware, fully featured, and easy to use, even for a beginner. Essentially, it allows you to make a bit-for-bit copy of a hard drive, even if Windows hasn't assigned a drive letter to it, such as with unrecognized format types. The catch is, when you copy one drive to another, it will appear identical, so any drive you copy your Velociraptor to, will appear to be the same capacity. If for example, you copied a 1 TB hard drive to a 2 TB hard drive, your 2 TB hard drive would appear to be 1 TB in size. So, when copying a hard drive to a drive of a different capacity, you may need to resize the drive image after you copy it, which is done with another utility.

SelfImage can be found here:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/selfimage.html

For managing the size of partitions on disks after you copy them, I use GParted, which is also free:

http://gparted.org/
 
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